After all this public speaking, I’m going to get really personal in this post. Sort of like spring cleaning. It’s also a good chance to practice my narrative writing, in case I ever manage to start my next book.
I just woke up from two rotten dreams. They used up half my night. In the first, I was in love with, or at least dating, an unknown woman. It seemed we had a future together. Then, in the middle of some sunny, social activity, she turned to me and said: “The trouble with you is that you talk too much.” I was stunned. How could she? It reminds me now of the time Lissy, the girl across the road, suddenly turned to me and said: “The trouble with you, Marc Lewis, is you’re fat!” I was eight at the time, not actually fat, but the memory still burns. Back in the dream, this woman’s invective spelled the end of our relationship. I flung back a stinging rebuke: I told her she raised her voice unpleasantly at the end of her sentences. So there! But now I was stumbling down a dirt road, utterly alone and lost, wondering where I could find drugs or booze.
Next, I was in a Chinese restaurant with family, friends, and someone resembling my ex-wife. I’d been dumb enough to order the buffet menu, when only a few scraps remained in the big pans on the counter. I saw the contempt in her eyes. I felt humiliated and isolated. The restaurant was going to close soon, and there I was, with a big bill and a small meal. But Ms Ex was not only contemptuous, she also turned cold and distant. Disconnected. That’s always been my worst fear. Next scene, I was at home (some home) with family, wondering if our visitors had brought a bottle of painkillers I could steal from.
When I woke up, ouch! What a way to start the day. But I lay in bed for awhile, thinking about my second marriage and how it ended. I’d been a good husband, actually a very good husband. Loving, supportive, faithful, as passionate as possible with three kids around, working my butt off to take care of those kids while earning tenure at the University of Toronto. Rushing home to help with dinner, then working late to get everything done. (Was that the problem?) And teaching an extra course to pay for our trip to England — my first 
sabbatical! Eleven days after we landed in Cambridge, nine years after we first got together, I discovered that she’d been having an affair with some Italian guy the last several months in Toronto. There was a half-finished email to a friend, open on the computer in the living room, describing how much she missed him.
A million times ouch! I drove around England for three days, nearly suicidal. Drinking and driving. Taking crazy risks. Then back to Cambridge, where there were kids to consider.
Things went downhill pretty fast after that. She left for Toronto within four months, then we separated legally five months later. She had not been eager to patch things up. Meanwhile, I’d spent most of my sabbatical in beautiful Cambridge slumped in depression, pretending to work and caring for my 8-year-old daughter. I’d loved that woman. And now she’d become cold, distant, and uncaring. Just like the woman in my dream, her ghostly descendant. I’d been off opiates for roughly 15 years at the time. Was I tempted to go back to them? Of course I was! But instead I drank. Every evening for a few months, scotch and/or beer. A lot. But not too much to put my kid to bed and get her up in the morning.
For me, substance use and substance addiction have always been a remedy for loneliness, abandonment, disconnection. The formula in my child’s mind is a simple one: disconnection from someone you thought was there for you = isolation = danger!!! Opiates made me feel safe. Booze at least numbed the anxiety. Ever since those years in boarding school, and probably long before that, loss of connection was my primal fear. It’s why I became an addict. And it’s still my primal fear, hence the dreams last night. I don’t think those things ever go away.
Yesterday I had a long lunch with a 24-year-old guy who’d had a serious — really serious! — video game addiction. “Pieter” wanted to meet me after reading my book. While nibbling and basking in a rare stretch of Dutch sunshine, I asked him about the games he’d played. He’d been a captain, a general, a Roman conqueror, leading his army over the mountains to subjugate foreign armies and occupy new lands. He was a 
great leader of men — for 10-15 hours a day. And then he’d come back to the real world and realize that another month or another year had passed, without having accomplished anything at all. Finally, at the age of 19, he was so tortured by his addiction that he managed to give it up. He couldn’t stand the idea that he was a hero in his games but an abject failure in his life. He spent the next two years emerging from a deep, lingering depression.
The longer I talked with Pieter, the more I noticed something odd. He had a strange, half-hidden arrogance mixed with his humility. He ended our lunch telling me, in great detail, how he’d connected deeply (during a workshop) with a really unattractive woman and taught her that even she could be accepted by a man as, um, accomplished, cool, and desirable as himself. It hit me like a ton of bricks: he still construes himself in terms of status and prestige. He always has. Which means he’s always been afraid that others would not recognize his value — something he soon confirmed.
What he’d gotten out of his gaming was a sense of mastery — exactly what he couldn’t find in his life.
He’s still missing epic-hero status, but he stuggles to stay in the running. At least he’s past his addiction and has a chance to recognize what he’s missing. And maybe to learn to live with the next best thing: a modicum of success. And I’m still missing a deep sense of security. But at least I’m past my addiction, and I’m (still) learning to live with the next best thing: a degree of self-trust, and a family who loves me and needs me for now.
…But if you try some time, you might find…you get what you need!
–The Rolling Stones
Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
Innocent to innocent,
One asked, what is perfect love,
Not knowing it is not love,
Which is imperfect – some kind
Of love or other, some kind
Of interchange with wanting,
There when all else is wanting,
Something by which we make do.
So,impaired, I innocent,
If I love you -as I do –
To the very perfection
Of perfect imperfection,
It’s that I care more for you
Than for my feeling for you.
By J.V. Cunningham, one of us.
I wish this site had a ‘LIKE” button. I would have clicked it for this. Thanks for sharing it, Nicolas.
Beautiful! Total goose-bumps.
Another touching post, Marc, one that strikes a chord with me.
Almost twenty years ago I read a few verses that that shook me to the core. I spent the next eighteen trying not to look at what those words showed me about myself. I’m happy to be free of the addiction and finally working on a real solution, but some days it’s a little depressing (though not particularly productive) to ponder all the time that passed between awareness and action.
Dean Koontz, The Book of Counted Sorrows (as shared by the author in Dark Rivers of the Heart)
Thanks, Chris. This is so terribly relevant. I’m reading (slowly) a philosophical essay which reviews neuroscience evidence that our brains make choices before we “intend” them. This is actually well established by now, and it can be disturbing. But this philosopher, Marc Slors, at my university, Radboud, advocates a pretty radical solution: setting the conditions for your brain to choose what you want it to choose. In advance. He calls it self-programming.
Maybe it’s not so radical. Maybe it’s just very good sense. I’m going to do a post on this soon.
Hi Marc
I’m glad you posted this, it makes me feel not so alone with my crazy collection of dreams. I’ve always thought that there was some link with desired self/ego and addiction. I went to extraordinary lengths to create all sorts of scenarios and bizarre, untrue life experiences that helped to create a personality that I was patently incapable of sustaining. The sad thing was that I was also very good at sucking people into this world and making them believe that I had the character strength to protect and and it. Unfortunately is all going one way because the inflated ego state demands increasing amounts of sustenance and, when strokes no longer suffice, chemicals or other behaviours fill it nicely for a while. Many of my dreams, although mainly very obscure, revolve around past past relationships, using and shame. I never quite get to a point where I experience the high of using, usually the components (syringe, water, drugs, etc.) are all in different places and there is always at least one essential part missing. Very often my ex-wife is involved but it usually involves me having to confess to her that I have relapsed and her informing work and my new friends. I nearly always wake, full of guilt and shame, believing for a couple of minutes that it was real. I reconcile myself that this is, in many ways, quite healthy in that these things are happening in the safety of my own bed and are a very small price to pay for the damage I have caused.
PS I’m putting a piece together about trust and treatment that will be with you shortly
Hi Peter. I’m looking very much forward to that piece. Meanwhile, the way you tell your story is always interesting, and I’m not surprised by what you dream and what you tell yourself when you awake. You say you built the persona first, then started using when it began to crumble. For me, I never got very far with building the persona until I discovered drugs. Drugs were very attractive to me, because they really did seem to be the only way.
My dreams of using are similar to yours. Always obstacles, frenzy, and great anxiety about being caught in the act. I rather hate those dreams most of the time. But now and then I do experience the drug-state in the dream, and the strange thing is that it’s no big deal.
Now I know that I want to ask my son about his dreams.
Dreams are a hard ride. Yeats got it right on in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
Those masterful images, because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse, of the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
And we go back there every night. It’s not always grim and
dark but so much of it is that it punctures our dreams of love and control.
It hurts so much that some seek relief from the burdens of being human from alcohol,
or morphine etc,
The whole ride is not for the squeamish and faint of heart.
Thanks for laying it out. Seems you’re just like me.
There is so much in your comment, Jeff. It doesn’t really allow a “reply”. The Yeats poem is almost suffocating in its incisiveness and its despair. And the drugs you mention do indeed replace one set of dreams for another.
Looking forward to our visit!
Yes dreams can be pretty confusing but deeply meaningful at the same time. Sometimes there are long episodes when the dreams mimic life so vividly that when shaken awake we do not know if we are still dreaming or if we are really awake. Familiar faces and personalities reappear, not so much as the true people we once knew, but more as nature’s conduits through which collective feelings from deep inside are channelled outwards. When one dreams of his father, is that the father who raised him, is it the father he has become or wants to become, or is it the father he can never be? Drugs cause dreams to become more real, whereas complete abstention from all kinds of drugs (including alcohol) intensifies dreams and makes them more real, more relevant and wonderfully meaningful.
I have a suggestion.
You are writing about dreams here. How about insomnia, the waking nightmare?
Fascinating points. I wrote about my dreams as a way of exploring them, because I could sense that they were full of coded meaning. I also spent half the day trying to remember who was the woman who raised her voice at the end of her sentences — and why that disturbed me. I did finally remember.
I have also noticed that my dreams are more vivid when I don’t drink alcohol. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it.
Yes, being clean causes crystal clear dreams to bubble up to the surface and bring back memories of the past as if they happened only yesterday. Forgetting your daily dose of Citalopram induces very intense episodes of dream rushes as if your internal stream of consciousness is magnified.
Great blog Marc! I love your writing, thoughts and the mind body connection. I would love to see you and Gabor Mate team up 😉 Great transcript from him below.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/gabor-mate-ayahuasca-maps-conference-2013?paging=off
Hi marc,
this post makes me think a lot!!!
I would probably add ‘we can’t always be what others whant us to be…’
I know very well this kind of dreams!!! And abandonment has always been my primal fear too!!! It’s why I became an anorexic…always be the best to be loved! always striving to reach new goals to be loved! always bringing the problems of others…to be loved!!! Everithing comes from an ‘insecure attachment ‘with our caregiver, that made us unable to deal with ‘the world’, incapable to cope with stress! Hence the need to escape…each with its own way…but with the same purpose: not to feel pain, not to feel the emptiness!!! but just becoming aware of that ‘early pain’ and learning to accept ourselves for we really are, we can begin to be ourselves…( the real not ideal self…)
Marc, Thank you for sharing your personal thoughts and insights. And thank you for causing me to have “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” going around in my head each time I read your blog entry! 🙂 I’m reminded of what a therapist once said to me: Each day, even if we haven’t achieved our dreams/goals, if we can say that our life/experiences/feelings are “good enough” then we are OK. It seems that we come back again to the demanding-ness of our world and its implications of people being left feeling bereft and sad for one reason or another after not reaching the pinnacles of love or success on any given day. Most of us are left scurrying around, looking for some kind of relief.
Anyway, I do hope you get to writing that book, because I, for one amongst many, I’m sure, look forward to reading it!
Denise
Yes, we scurry, but coming up empty sometimes pushes the panic button, and then we plunge.
The best way to get one Stones song out of your head is to put another one in. Depending on what was your drug of choice, Moonlight Mile might work. Or Sister Morphine?
Actually right now I have an ’80’s song called The Breakup Song going around in my head… over and over, Crimson and Clover, too. The Breakup Song is more commonly known as “They don’t write like that anymore” though until now I always thought it was “They don’t ride like that anymore.” We learn something new every day… And, if I had to choose a replacement tune from the Stones it would definitely be Sister Morphine, or better yet, Gimme Shelter!
A family who loves you and needs you (and who you love and need in return) is a lot more than the next best thing to security in my opinion. It’s about as good as it gets, and if it is sustained, in the long run I think it yields genuine security even if it has to be monitored, renewed, retweaked, adjusted and so on. I’m not sure how long it has to be sustained but it can be genuinely transformative. I’m not sentimental about family life, and I know that familial love does not come to many, but if you feel you’ve attained it, that’s as great an achievement as any of your others.
You’ve knocked my socks off with this post, Marc. As you wrote above in a comment, “Beautiful! Total goose bumps.” ~ I remember my first year (in particular) at university. I was delving into addiction — the study of it. Now, 32 years later, I read this post and think, “The essence of it all is right here.” All of it — the insatiable curiosity; the agony of so much addiciton (esp. alcoholism) in my original family; my own grappling with the ‘monkey on my back’; the recent death of my brother … and the ongoing struggle of all of us, every single one of us, with some form of what I call devotion, deranged. Total goose bumps. You’ve nailed the experience of it. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Jaliya. That is a fine compliment. Yes, so much addiction, in so many families ….just scratch the surface and it’s there. I’m glad you’re still around.
I just found this post. The poem is Emily Dickinson.
There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
‘Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.
Reading this post again as I apply for a mind and life summer school program makes me positively nostalgic but also triggers considerable dissapointment.
Causing this dissapointment, Marc, is the main element of our lengthy lunch that day that you have decided to incorporate in your blog. Although I like the side of the medal that you summarize there: “he’s always been afraid that others would not recognize his value” absolutely true, and yes that is why I tend(ed) (recovery is an equally slow as amazing process) to construe myself in terms of achievements and prestige.
But it gives me the feeling you completely missed the main point of what I told you with respect to my tantric experience. Well no, I know you did, and that is my fault. far to reckless I treid sharing the biggest ally I had found in my recovery, namely the essence of that tantric experience and the seed it made sprout. I wanted to share that with you as I you were about to have a chat with the dalai lama, and I hoped this particular profoundly spiritual ally might help you in your meeting.
in retrospect I see how naive that ideas was and how impulsively I blurted out that storry knowing we had to wrap up as I had already occupied hours of your time. Of course you did not catch the point. You could perhaps only have, had you shared a similar experience to use a reference for the short storry I was shooting at you. We’ll I wanted to write I was dissapointed primarily in myself as I apparently failed communicating something so meaningful to me to some one sharing quite some background and resulting aims in life. but all is good, it makes perfect sense the way it went.
though it would be nice if some day the possiblity presented itself to draw again the other side of the medal. now almost a year ahead, it’s shape and alloy have become increasingly clear, and I might give it a far better go to explain.
All the best, “pieter”
ps: thanks for recommending the MLI to me, I’ve attended its first EU conference in berlin last October, and am, right this moment, in the process of applying for its summer program.